If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might remember that Juniordwarf and I cook biscuits every Tuesday so that he has a treat to take to school for the rest of the week.

Usually we make ANZACs, but we’ve also made shortbread and sometimes even choc-chip cookies. Last week he said he wanted to make choc-chip cookies, but we didn’t have any choc chips, so I told him we’d have to go to the shop before we baked.

Well the thought of that didn’t appeal to his sense of routine.

We go up the street after lunch, which we have after we’ve baked. So he wasn’t keen on that idea at all, and decided he wanted to make ‘the oat ones’ instead.

When we finally did go up the street last Tuesday (after lunch, of course), we bought a bag of choc chips so that we’d be prepared for today.

The cookies really are very yummy.

I got the recipe from an American guy called Mike, who was an exchange student at the same time I was, and who had impressed everyone with these cookies. Naturally everyone had wanted the recipe.

This is it – with my own variations as necessary.

Ingredients

¾ cup raw sugar

¾ cup soft brown sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

230 grams soft butter

2 ¼ cup plain (wholemeal) flour

Yeah! 1 bag choc chips

What you do

Mix sugars, salt, vanilla, eggs and butter in a large bowl until creamy.

On Tuesdays Juniordwarf and I cook biscuits for him to take to school for morning tea over the rest of the week. Ever since the start of the year, we’ve made ANZACs. Every single Tuesday.

He now knows the recipe word-perfect, gets everything out of the cupboard ready to make the biscuits, and has his own particular tasks – putting the ‘gold and sirrit’ into the bowl with the butter to be melted and licking the golden syrupoff the spoon, tipping the dry ingredients into the mixing bowl, measuring out the bicarb soda, and eating as much of the dough as he can while I actually make the biscuits.

I’ve tried to convince him to try something other than ANZACs, but he is a creature of habit and insists on ANZACs every week. Not even the idea of choc-chip cookies would budge him.

In a last ditch attempt, yesterday I asked if he wanted to use the letter-shaped cookie cutters that his aunt got him. He was very keen, so I thought we’d give shortbread a go today.

I made shortbread for the first time a couple of years ago as Xmas gifts. I had no idea how to make it, so turned to my trusty friend Google, only to be overwhelmed by different recipes.

The one I settled on was the simplest: 3-2-1.

That’s the ratio of flour to butter to sugar that you need. The actual amount depends on how much dough you want. We used 375 grams of plain wholemeal flour, 250 grams of butter and 125 grams of raw caster sugar.

(I can always remember the ratio, but I can never remember what the 2 and the 1 are for, so inevitably I have to re-Google it every time I want to make shortbread.)

Juniordwarf was very excited to be cutting out letters.

Correction, he was excited for me to be cutting out the letters. He supervised, and told me what letters to cut out. We started with his name, and then all of the letters in a random order that probably made sense to him. And finally the numbers 1 to 10 (or rather 1 to 1 and 0).

There was still a lot of dough left over and I didn’t fancy cutting out more letters, as they are quite fiddly, especially trying to get the middle bits out, so we used a dinosaur cutter for the rest of the dough. The final little bits (that he didn’t eat) became Zs.

It took a lot longer than it takes to make ANZACs, so I’m not sure I want to be doing this every week. I want to make choc-chip cookies! But I think I might just have created a monster, and it isn’t the dinosaur biscuits.